“No hate like Christian love” – was the prompt for this episode. A comment on a social media post was met with this response.
And I get it.
Recorded in the calm before storm Floris from a campervan on the west coast of Scotland, I share a brief reflection on love from a Christian theological perspective. My take is that we are compelled, as Christians, to love. And for me, this means praxis or love in action.
However, this is contextualised with awareness that some people have been deeply wounded by Christianity.
Transcript
There is no hate like Christian love
You may have heard this phrase before. I confess I hadn’t heard it until quite recently. It’s particularly prominent in ex -evangelical and deconstruction circles, mostly in the USA. This phrase highlights the ways in which people have been hurt and damaged by Christianity. Evangelical and fundamentalist expressions of Christianity in particular. My impulse as someone who believes that Christianity is a religion based in love, might be to try and do the ‘not all Christians’ thing. But I recognise this is futile in the face of hurt and anger. Instead, I am going to do what I always do and make a podcast. This episode is about Love.
You are listening to UNFKD, the bonus series of my podcast “Fkd up by faith,” where I explore theology and adjacent ideas that are harmful, misunderstood, or just plain wrong. This episode is a bit different because I’m not sitting in my little studio at home with my podcast equipment. Instead, I’m sitting in my campervan – which actually makes a really good recording studio, and I am looking out from the Island of Mull towards the Island of Iona. I think I’ve mentioned Iona in other episodes. It’s the little island off the west coast of Scotland, which was inhabited by Saint Columba, also known as Colmcille, who established his monastery here in the sixth century. Nowadays it is home to the Iona community and sees many visitors and pilgrims to visit the Abbey.
This reflection came from a post that I saw on social media yesterday. I no longer use the usual mainstream social media applications for all the reasons reasons, but I do use Blue Sky. You might be laughing because Blue Sky is often seen as a little left-wing or liberal bubble. Honestly, I like it that way. However, I don’t post a lot. Sometimes I “re-post” other people’s posts. I do lurk and find a lot of my news that way.
I saw a post by someone well-known in progressive Christian circles. They were talking about the idea of Christianity or people claiming to be Christians who speak or behave in ways that go against the Christian idea of love. I couldn’t help myself. Sometimes the urge comes upon me to comment on posts like that. My comment was that without love then it isn’t Christianity at all. The person who answered my comment and used this quote went so far as to say that, ”Nobody has ever seen a Christianity with love. What Christians call love is so far away from love that we had to come up with the saying “no hate like Christian love”.
I get it. This is the theological waters that I swim in: religious trauma, spiritual abuse, and the ways in which people have been damaged by religion, especially Christianity. I know about the ways in which so-called Christians and Christian organisations act in hateful ways and then call it love, or say that it’s in the name of love. Being exposed to, and especially growing up in such an expression of Christianity is deeply harmful.
As someone who takes a particular interest in this topic, I am compelled to be understanding, even if I don’t agree with what the person is saying. And I don’t. It is simply not objectively true to say that there is no expression of Christianity that is loving. There are many ways in which people express and experience Christian love, the way that I would argue it should be. However, some people who have experienced religious harm or spiritual abuse within Christianity, sometimes adopt a view that suggests that all Christians are problematic, and that Christianity is based in hypocrisy and lies. Indeed even people who have not been harmed by Christianity adopt this view. It is a common stance amongst the more vocal atheists, for example, to suggest that Christianity is responsible for more harms that goods. This is also, objectively untrue, even if it sounds like it should be true. However, this episode is not about that. I may do an unfkd on that question in the future.
I thought it might be an idea to explore what Christianity has to say about love and perhaps give some examples of how Christians have shown love. There are many ways in which we can look at the subject of love, summer, theological perspective, and as with most of the topics I tackle in this podcast The discussion can be wide and complex. However. Theologians are generally united in agreeing that Christianity is, at its heart, a religion of love.
Most significant at the heart of this assertion is that Jesus Christ actually compels us to love each other. It’s one of those kind of non negotiable givens.
John 13:34-35
34 I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’
Matthew 22:36-40
36 ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ 37 He said to him, ‘“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’
Indeed these are often cited as the only two real commandments that he gave. The clear interpretation of this is that we are compelled as followers of Jesus, to show love to others.
Now the definitions of what this love means vary among commentators. And this is very much shaped by historical and philosophical influences over the centuries. I will link to an excellent resource about these theological influences in the show notes. However, prime among the ways in which we can view the idea of Christian love is first and foremost rooted in God’s love. That is God’s love for us, and ours for God. Thus love is expressed as a dynamic relationship between the human and the divine.
This is shaped of course by our modern understandings of human biology, psychology and behaviour. St. Augustine for example believed that ONLY God could love, and therefore, any expression of love was an expression of God. Theology also went through a period of trying to separate pure love which came from God, from other lesser forms of love that were based in human desire. This has also been expressed as Agape love, a selfless, sacrificial love sometimes described as caritas. This is seen as distinct from Eros, the love which encompasses desire. Whilst there are some who might still work within this distinction, I think it is more common to consider love in a more integrated way. And certainly my view is that all relationships : with humans, with other creatures, with the environment, with our communities and indeed with the whole universe are a dynamic interplay with God as the foundation, the ground of all being, and indeed as love itself.
Bear in mind this is my theology and other theologies are available.
My thinking is that we can get rather caught up trying to define Christian love rather than get on with the business of doing love. In this respect we can see Christian love as Praxis. The ways that this might play out in practice include the ways in which I choose to meet and communicate with others, to the ways in which I engage with my community and with the world. For some, this is about engaging in acts of local community service, for others it is about larger acts of social activism.
Which brings us back to the original stimulus for this discussion, the idea that there is no hate like Christian love. What this refers to are the ways in which human beings have abused, corrupted, distorted and misunderstood what it means to be a Christian. IN the minds of some people who have been the victims of this, it corrupts Christianity altogether. The Christian response to this, should, if we are being Christian about it, be with love.
Bible References
John 13:34-35 (NRSV)
Matthew 22:36-40 (NRSV)
Theological resources
Jeanrond, Werner G. A Theology of Love. London, T & T Clark, 2010.
Jeanrond, Werner G., ‘ Love’, in Nicholas Adams, George Pattison, and Graham Ward (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought (2013; online edn, Oxford Academic, 3 June 2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199601998.013.0012,
“Hell Mend Them!” I said to a friend the other day. We were talking about the US administration. He by the way is an American and also a priest and he had never heard the phrase. I have since discovered like many of my expressions it’s actually idiomatically Scots and also like many of my expressions I didn’t realise that it was Scots until non-Scots pointed out to me that they had never heard it before. The phrase is more accurately “Hell Mend Ye” or “Hell Mend You” and you would be more likely to hear it in previous generations of parents or grandparents, and they would use it as a warning about the consequences of doing something stupid or harmful.
This is Unfkd, the bonus series of my podcast Fkd Up By Faith, where I examine theology or theology-related ideas which are harmful, misunderstood, or just plain wrong. I’m Jude Mills, and today we’re going to talk about hell.
Like most episodes of UNFKD it isn’t my hope or my intention to give you the history and evolution of the idea of hell in Christian theology. I’m going to make the assumption that you are pretty familiar with the Contemporary ideas of hell. As a place of fiery punishment and torture. These images and ideas are rife in art, literature, television and film. They are part of our collective Consciousness Whether we are religious or not. The other thing that I think it’s important to point out is that hell isn’t just a Christian concept. Ideas of hail or health states or hell realms exist in many different religious contexts. And the idea of hell, as we might understand it, isn’t necessarily the idea that was inherited either from the Hebrew Scriptures or from the person of Jesus Christ. I will link to resources in the show notes Gave an excellent breakdown or understandings of hell in Christian theology.
What I am going to talk about is why idea of hell as a place or a state of punishment might be compelling to us, and why I think that the idea of hell is not just harmful and misunderstood it is also just plain wrong. Firstly, I suppose I should talk about why I (and many other Scots) use the phrase Hell Mend Ye.
Given Scots post-reformation history, the invocation of hell is perhaps unsurprising. As the historian Michelle D Brock writes,
‘For many Scots, the Reformed faith entailed, in both theory and in exercise, a complex and often anxious process of questioning the self. This internal questioning stemmed from a potent mix of ideas about the Devil, innate depravity, and double predestination (the doctrine that God has foreordained both those who will be saved and those who will be damned). The collision of these doctrines with experiential struggles against Satan caused the self-identified godly in Scotland, in moments of intense scrutiny, to believe the very worst: that they were irrevocably evil, even demonic, and destined for an eternity in hell.‘
I found myself trying to put this phrase into theological context for my priest friend. What do I mean by ‘hell mend them.’? Even before I could call myself a theologian I knew what the arguments were against the existence of any reality that could be described as hell. If I believe that there is a loving God, I cannot also believe that the same God would subject their beloved children – made in God’s own image – to the eternal torment of fire. The same God whose sacrifice in the figure of Christ, we are also told put an end to all of that eternal damnation nonsense.
The Eastern Orthodox Scholar David Bentley Hart writes this,
‘For the whole substance of Christian faith is the conviction that another has already and decisively gone down into that abyss for us, to set all the prisoners free, even from the chains of their own hatred and despair; and hence the love that has made all of us who we are, and that will continue throughout eternity to do so, cannot ultimately be rejected by anyone.‘
If you haven’t read his book ‘That All Shall be Saved’ I highly recommend it. He writes in the mostly deliciously eviscerating way about the literalism of fundamentalist bible interpretations and how utterly illogical the idea of hell is.
What I cannot get away from or avoid is that in the gospels Jesus talked quite a lot about hell. More accurately, however, he didn’t use that word because hell is an English word with Saxon roots. The word that he most often used was Gehenna and Gehenna could mean all sorts of things depending on the context. It could either mean a place of spiritual separation or punishment or torment. It could mean an actual physical place where fires did burn and where historically there were sacrifices made.
My favourite (Maybe my second favourite) bible passage, that one in the Gospel Matthew where Jesus talks about the ‘least of these’? As much as I would like to, I cannot avoid the part where he also talks about ‘eternal fire’ and ‘eternal punishment’. [Matthew 25: 41-46]
‘Then he will say to those at his left hand, “You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry, and you gave me no food. I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink. I was a stranger, and you did not welcome me naked, and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.”
Then they also will answer, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison and did not take care of you?” Then he will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.‘
And of course this makes it really tricky. It’s easier to perhaps perform a very nifty hermeneutic of avoidance. And I suspect that you may well have witnessed or, if you’re a preacher, even performed such a manoeuvre.
The problem only arises, or at least should, if we indulge in literalism and fail to read the bible, as I believe it should be read, in context. Or more accurately contexts which include the historical, social and religious context of the time that it was written in, the religious tradition that it arose out of, as well as understanding of the biblical use of metaphor and imagery. Which Jesus used all the time. The subject of a literal or metaphorical hell has and continues to be the source of much debate and that includes whether on not Jesus meant that people would literally be consigned to eternal fire, or if he meant something else. As you would imagine, I vote for the something else. Jesus, as we know was Jewish, was speaking to a Jewish audience and they would have been very used to hearing things in the form of metaphor and symbolism. Jesus is frequently heard using metaphors to make a point, and uses parables to illustrate lots of different aspects of his theology. We find it easy to accept that when he says, for example, that we should or cut off our right hand [Matthew 5:30] that he means it metaphorically. I think we can assume, given the style in which the gospel writer Matthew writes, and presents how Jesus spoke, that the same metaphorical analysis can apply to the parts when he talks about eternal fire. Otherwise, we are indulging in a curious kind of cherry picking exercise.
The thing is, part of me finds the idea of post- mortem punishment rather compelling. The world is filled with such blatant acts of cruelty. The truth is it always has been, but it’s more visible to us now. There are those people in the world, and always have been those, who not only don’t do things for ‘the least of these’ but actively go out of their way to make things worse for them. To be uncaring and cruel and sadistic. The idea of hellish consequences for these deeds appeals to my desire for justice. But despite my anger and frustration, I have no real desire to see anyone punished for eternity, even if I believed that such a place existed. But I do have a desire – and I have a feeling this is pretty universal – that a truly people don’t just ‘get away with it.’
It feels right though, doesn’t it, that our worldly actions have a consequence, even (or maybe especially) if we do not face that consequence on the worldly plane
This is how human beings function. We don’t like to see wrongdoing go unchecked. There are those, like me, who believe wholeheartedly in rehabilitation, in reconciliation, in restorative justice, and then there are the ‘hanging is too good for them’ types. Either way, the need and the desire for justice is very human. I often see the invocation of there being a ‘special place in hell’, often by non-religious people who are hoping against their own judgement that a divine justice might take the place of a lack of it in this current mortal reality. However, it is sobering to remember – to be reminded – that some of these folk think that I might have such a special place reserved for me. And for people like me, for the leftists and the queers and the ‘woke’.
I’ve been thinking about this and ‘Hell Mend Them’ suggests that hell might have a restorative power. A state, not of torment, but of healing, of cleansing. Being mended means being fixed, being healed, to be made whole .I believe that this maybe (at least partly) is what Jesus meant. That we cannot escape the spiritual and psychological consequences of our wrongdoings. Now we know this to be the case simply from our own experience of guilt and shame (well most of us do) There is another layer of theology which suggests that Gehenna (or hell if you prefer) might be the experience of the absence of God.
My imagination leads me to a mirror, in which the sinful, and the guilty (which is all of us) are invited to look at ourselves face to face. And, held in this reflective fire, seeing who we are and what we have done, we come to know who we are in relationship with God. and how separate we have imagined ourselves to be. I believe that this can only be imagined because the God of my understanding is A God who is the ground and substance and nature of all being. As we heard David Bentley hart say earlier, “the love that has made all of us who we are, and that will continue throughout eternity to do so, cannot ultimately be rejected by anyone.”
References
Brock, M.D. (2016). Satan and the Scots : the Devil in Post-Reformation Scotland, c.1560-1700. Abingdon, Routledge.
I would like to invite you to do something point to heaven.Now, I bet that quite a few of you are pointing up the way.
Everyone knows that heaven is up there, right? Or is it?This is UNFKD, the bonus series of my podcast Fkd Up by Faith, where I talk about theology or theology related ideas which are harmful, misunderstood or just plain wrong.
And today we’re talking about the Ascension.In the episode that I did at Easter about the resurrection, I promised that I would do this episode on the Ascension.
Now the Feast of the Ascension actually occurs on the Thursday 40 days after Easter, which would make it last Thursday.But a lot of churches in the Catholic and Anglican traditions will celebrate Ascension on the following Sunday after Ascension Thursday.
And this often happens with some of the bigger feast days.I suppose it’s to allow more people to go to mass.So as this podcast goes out, Ascension Sunday was yesterday.
That was Sunday the 1st of June.Now, if you are unaware of the Ascension story, or even if you are here, it is as it’s described in the book of Acts.
ACTS 1: 1-11 (NRSV)
“In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning until the day when He was taken up to heaven.
After giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen after his suffering, He presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during 40 days and speaking about the Kingdom of God.
While staying with them, He ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father.This, he said, is what you have heard from me.For John baptised with water, but you will be baptised with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.
So when they had come together, they asked him, Lord, is this the time when you will restore the Kingdom to Israel? He replied, It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by His own authority, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.
When He had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took Him out of their sight.While he was going, and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them.
They said, Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will come in the same way as you saw Him go into heaven.”
The Ascension, like most of the themes that I choose for this podcast, is very much misunderstood and has been the subject of much debate and controversy over the centuries. And nowadays, because it continues to be something which is difficult to get your head around, it’s kind of ignored, I would say. I personally love it.That’s partly because it’s one of the major feast days that I have been privileged to preach on in the church.I really enjoyed getting my theological teeth into particularly the mysticism inherent in the story.
And So what I’m going to share is one of those sermons, if you want to call it that, gently modified for this medium in which I explore what it means, certainly from my theological perspective, for Jesus to have ascended into heaven and kind of what that means for us. Now, as always, I’ll include in the show notes some pointers towards additional resources that you can look at if you want to know a little bit more.All right, let’s get into it.
If you Google or use another search engine, the Ascension, you will.If you look at the images, you’ll see many depictions painted throughout the centuries, and almost all of them show Jesus floating upwards or on or into a cloud. Sometimes he’s surrounded by angels, sometimes he is being pulled seemingly by the hand of God, and sometimes, rather amusingly, you will see just his feet disappearing into a cloud.
The astronomer Carl Sagan is reported at least to have said if Jesus were caught up at the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second, with what we know today about the vastness of our Galaxy, Jesus would still be travelling today just to reach the outer limits of the Milky Way.Furthermore, there are billions and billions of galaxies now.
As 21st century Christians, we know, most of us, that the Earth is a globe with an atmosphere with it’s own weather systems. We have the benefit of understanding that the Earth is part of a vast solar system, an even vaster Galaxy, and an unimaginably vast universe.We can be pretty certain from the evidence of science and from our own experience, most of us have been in an aeroplane, that heaven is not physically up there above the clouds.
So where is it? In truth, attempting to grapple with any literal interpretation of the Ascension story is, I think, missing the point.At the top of the episode I asked you to point to heaven. So if I were to ask you another question, which is where is God, you might answer something like, well, God is everywhere.Contrary to popular imagery, God is not a man in the sky.
God cannot be pinned down by geography, or by direction, or indeed any of the rules of the physical universe as we understand them.Any sense of God or heaven being up there is to restrict God to a view which is always mediated both by our human senses and our current understanding of the laws of the universe.
We are told in the ascension story that Jesus was taken out of sight in a cloud.Now clouds in biblical terms are often represent the presence of God.So Jesus in this sense may be seen to have been enveloped in the cloud of God. So taken back, absorbed back into God, He returned as he came to God’s everywhereness.This everywhereness of God is utterly beyond our imagining, because it isn’t everywhere in any physical, tangible, touchable, measurable way.
There’s a a book by an anonymous 14th century Mystic.It’s called The Cloud of Unknowing, and in this book the author describes this idea in a very beautiful way, as Mystics often do. So this is what they say.
“Since Christ ascended in physical form and then afterwards sent the Holy Spirit physically, it was more fitting that his journey to heaven was described as up rather than down, and that the Holy Spirit’s path to earth was described as from above rather than from below, from behind, in front of or on one side or another.I say that it was more fitting because it makes more sense to us, but in reality, the direction that he went up instead of down didn’t matter since it’s all the same distance.Spiritually speaking, heaven is as close down as up, as close behind as before, as quickly reached from one side as the other.“
One of the other readings assigned for Ascension is from Saint Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, and in it Paul asks us to be enlightened by the eyes of our hearts with this understanding, the everywhereness of Christ who is one with God.It’s not something we can see with our physical eyes, but it can certainly be felt, and we’re told in the ascension story how we access it. We access it through the presence of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is seen as the final redemptive gift of the whole Paschal mystery, the story of Easter. And that culminates in next Sunday celebration of Pentecost, the celebration of when the Holy Spirit descends on the disciples when they’re in Jerusalem.In this way we might imagine that heaven is not so much up as in Saint Augustine said.
“He is here with us by his divinity, his power, and his love.We cannot be in heaven as he is on earth by divinity, but in him we can be there by love.When the disciples witnessed Jesus final bodily departure from earth, they might have felt sad, but we are told that they returned to Jerusalem with joy.“
And so it’s with joy that we recognise that while Jesus is no longer visible with our physical eyes, Christ is always with us.
I’ll leave you with the words of the late Pope Francis. This from a homily that he gave for the Ascension.
“The Lord’s ascension into heaven, while inaugurating a new form of Jesus presence among us, calls us to keep eyes and hearts open to encounter Him, to serve him and bear witness to him to others.It is a matter of being people of the Ascension, that is, those who seek Christ along the paths of our time.On this journey we encounter Christ in our brothers and sisters.As at the beginning the risen Christ sent his apostles with the power of the Holy Spirit, so too does he send all of us today with the same power so as to establish concrete and visible signs of hope.”
14:54
You’ve been listening to Fkd Up by Faith UNFKD.I’m Jude Mills.You can listen to the podcast on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.You can connect with the podcast on social media. I am on BlueSky as Jude Mills.The podcast Fkd Up by Faith is on Instagram or you can find out about the podcast on my website judemills.com.If you would like to be a guest on the Fkd Up by Faith podcast, I’d love to hear from you.
So do get in touch.Go well.
RESOURCES/LINKS
Reading from from the Acts of the Apostles 1: 11 (NRSV)
Cults are Autistic (Episode 129) by Dr. Angela Kingdon
In this episode we’re talking about Cults and Extremist religious movements in autistic culture. And why, like getting out of the mafia, leaving can be both dangerous and sacred.
I had an absolute blast talking to Emily Larsen and Trey Comstock from Divine Provisions Co. They are both United Methodist pastors based in Houston Texas, and together as Divine Provisions Co. they produce no less than three podcasts.
We move from Trey and Emily’s Fkd Up By Faith stories – OMG is all I can say – to talking about the theology of pool party baptisms and ministry as a game of Dungeons and Dragons.
Episode Transcript
Opening Music
Hello and welcome to Fkd Up By Faith. My name’s JUDE Mills. In this podcast, we have conversations with people who’ve been Fkd up by their faith and we explore how they found hope, healing, reconciliation and forgiveness in or out of their faith tradition.
JUDE: My guests today on Fkd Up By Faith are Emily Larson and TREY Comstock. Together they are Divine Provisions, and they have no less than three podcasts.
TREY: Yes, shocking amount.
JUDE: One is Cut the Crap, which I have been on, and we had an awesome conversation. that does pretty much what it says, but they describe it as intentionally heretical, which is right up my Strasse. And then they have How to Restart a Church, again, how to restart a church.
TREY: And maybe how to do it better this time.
JUDE: How to do it better, exactly. And then The Goodness of God, which is musings on the revised common lectionary and it’s much more interesting than it sounds. So it’s a podcast about scripture, about life and about being the church. And I was just listening to one this afternoon as I was preparing for this where you were talking about the gospel of John and Mary pouring the excessive amount of spikenard all over Jesus. That was a really, really interesting conversation. So I recommend all of those to the folks who are listening.
So I’m going to start with a prayer because I’m in the right company for such a thing. So, and it’s a prayer that I have written particularly for F***ed Up By Faith.
God of all love, as we join together today, we bring our whole selves, our joy, our pain, our gifts and our flaws and all that makes us human. May this space be one where we might find hope, healing, reconciliation or forgiveness. Bless everyone listening, remind them that they are loved. And even in the struggle and in the mess, you are with us. Amen. Amen.
So we’re going to start with Emily, I think. Emily. How were you Fkd up by your faith?
EMILY : Well, while I was thinking about coming on this podcast and the stories that I could share, I could probably do an entire episode called Fuck the Patriarchy. Yeah. And just we’re working on an episode of Cut the Crap with that title specifically with that title because of the times, the many stories I could share of you know, gentlemen telling me whether or not I should even be in ministry or women should be silent in church, what I should wear, what I should not wear, what they thought of me while I was wearing something, which is highly inappropriate during ministry. But also a lot of our work has centred around this idea of where the church has broken people, where we have marginalized people.
not just women, but all sorts of people on the margins. And a lot of that sort of centred around for us, this split in the United Methodist Church over LGBTQ rights in the church with the global Methodist Church now is now a separate denomination. And I just remember the comments that were made from friends, from clergy friends that I had done very meaningful ministry with for decades. I have been in ministry for decades with these people who are now on the other side of the line than I am. But it’s almost like it gave them this permission to say things that they never would have said otherwise. I remember two gentlemen colleagues during a conference before the split while all of the discussions were being made, and I was sharing with them how I was going into ordained ministry, and I was really excited to share it with them. And they looked at me and said, oh, well, you’re staying United Methodist. Do we have to change your pronouns? know? Oh, I don’t like that one. Rudely assumed. And so I am not a quippy person. I do not have good comebacks. But to that one, I actually did that day. I looked at them and I said, yes, I’m going to start preaching in drag. I’m going to start preaching in pants.
Just because it was so ridiculous. The fact that they would have permission to say those sorts of things. And I grieve for those relationships that were lost in the split because we did wonderful ministry to a lot of people for a very long time. I mean, at people’s death beds, in their weddings, at their babies’ baptisms, meaningful touch points in people’s lives.
TREY: a grand moment for the quiet part finally being said out loud.
EMILY: Yes. Yes. So that was just there was a lot of heartbreak around that.
TREY: There was that time that you went and went to a meeting in Palestine, Texas, as like representative of the church, because I couldn’t go. And there were only two things that you were my you were my associate at that point. Right. Like you were like, fully like a pastor at this church. Right. Like we, you know, clergy team and So it was one of those natural like a pastor needed to go to this I couldn’t go so the other pastor goes like very normal And that meaning at that meeting they could only assume you were one of two things You were either my admin which you were not or my spouse which you are not like you know when you think about like Fkd by the patriarchy like that was one of like, you know, Maybe we should have seen this coming, but you know I was like I felt bad because I knew I’d sent clearly it sent you into hell without meaning to Who knew?
EMILY: Yes, you know God bless him and even after correcting them. I was like no not his spouse Just his clergy partner.
TREY: right like not like Captain first mate, Picard and Riker. This is where, you know, that level of everything. You will learn if you listen to any of our shows, everything is either Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or Star Trek. Like that’s all I’ve got. Sometimes Harry Potter. Or Harry Potter.
JUDE: Emily, have you ever been called the Lady Pastor?
Emily: Yes. Yes. used to get that. The Lady Pastor. Just like, you know. The level of it is fixed there. Oh, God. Or even most recently, it’s been so in a program, a bulletin that was published. of that because there were several other pastors who were serving in, you know, retired pastors who were doing the prayer or the liturgy of the day. And so all of their names were printed with REV in front of them. And then I, was preaching and leading the service that day, did not get my title in, which I really care about titles. But if you’re going to put them in, put them in for everyone. It’s everybody or nobody, right? in a world where no one has title, no one else’s titles, like never insist on yours. like everyone else is getting their title. Like it sends a message. Right. Mm hmm. Yes. Yes.
TREY: You know, yeah, Lady Pastor is like, I, I, I, all colleagues of like, like, oh, like, why is that such a problem? And then every like, you know, female identifying pastor I ever talked to is like, oh, Jesus Christ, it’s terrible. Like it is one of those places where, like, oh, right. This is horrific.
JUDE: Yeah. Yeah. I got it frequently when I was working in chaplaincy. If I was in the office as the as the you know, the chaplain and there happened to be a man in the office with me. He was often a volunteer, they would talk to the man. This is my office. Yes. My name is on the door.
EMILY: Oh my God. What a mess. And so strangely enough, that pastor who had asked me about my pronouns was actually the pastor that TREY followed at one of our mutual appointments that had also caused a lot of um interesting Fkd by your faith stories.
TREY: Yeah, so for me, getting Fkd by my faith is a movement in three acts. And one of them has very little to do with the church, actually, and everything to do with being a depressed kid and not knowing what depression is. Yeah. So growing up, I a lot of people, their church trauma comes from childhood or young adulthood. For me, it’s all largely later in life, you know, in my 20s and 30s, but growing up, I had a fairly healthy, if normal church and a youth group that was really nice and a lot of friends and it was fine. But I spent my whole like young adulthood thinking that like I was never gonna be able to connect with God because like, If you chart human emotion on a one to 10 scale, I top out at a six. That’s just how my brain’s wired. There are receptors that I have that are blocked. That’s just how my brain works. And I didn’t know that at the age of 16. I wish someone would have told me that. But I know that now. But I’m watching all these people have these ecstatic religious experiences. We’re at a church like camp and you’re at the like worship at like eight o’clock at night and the bands go in and like people are like flipping out and I’m like I feel nothing. What are they experiencing? And when am I going to? And the answer is I was never going to. And so until I was 20 probably I just thought that I like I desperately wanted to connect with God. I really did since like a reality to the divine. I’m not really good at faith, I had enough that like, really think, really want something and I really believed I couldn’t get it. And eventually like through like therapy and finding religious space that made sense for me and learning about what depression is, like I eventually now I’m in a place like, oh, it’s okay.
Like I am in a connection and experience the divine in these other ways and in the same way that like I experience marriage and parenting differently. It’s like, did you cry when your child was born? No, I have never cried for joy. It is not a thing I am physically capable of doing, but that does not make me any less of a parent. That last sentence is a thing I learned later in life. Like that’s not perhaps the thing I like.
I often think I often apologize to my beloved spouse of like honey, like I’m really sorry I just feel like I’m the wrong person in this moment and she’s like, TREY, we’ve been together for 18 years. You think I don’t know. So again, it’s not the people I largely it’s not been the people around me that have done this particular harm to me. It is all the like me looking at a world I feel cut off from and thinking there’s something wrong with me rather than merely there’s something different about me that also gives me gifts and abilities and to be able to connect with people who, you know, have that kind of wired brain, right? You know, depressed people can connect in a different, like I can like help other depressed people who have like are on this journey, right? But I’m never going to have the like, I’m just lost in the joy right now because I am physically incapable of getting lost in the joy right now.
And that really, mean, that, you know, early in my life, that really Fkd me up. Yeah. Oh, as you say, I think that’s why it’s so important. We try to emphasize that your faith is not just a feeling. Right. Right. There’s such a culture around. Well, if you’re not feeling it, if you’re not speaking in tongues, if you’re not falling down on the ground or jumping happy, clapping, crying, then you’re not experiencing the divine, which is just not true. No, exactly. Yeah. And then there was the church that hated us or me specifically. And unfortunately, you were caught in the crossfire because I couldn’t produce the happy jumpy smiley thing.
So we followed a narcissist. Emily ended up at this church. I got assigned to this church. It’s where we became friends and colleagues. Had built the church around his ability to manipulate emotions from people. And then Convinced that congregation that having the emotions manipulated out of you was the very presence of God and so I show up and I’m like this like Stand-up comic with chronic depression. I could have just said stand-up comic. I’ll stand-up comics have chronic depression It’s just it’s just two and two, but And so I think of myself as like fun interesting like really Focused on like hey, oh, you’re someone who’s never connect with church before awesome me neither and like whatever and 50 % of the church left essentially immediately and that’s sucks anyways and almost all of them would sit in my office and Explain to me how I am the reason that they are leaving because they think that not the like Narcissist that like had an affair and then got like very publicly divorced, had the church take sides of his divorce, got arrested for suppressing evidence, although for legal reasons, I do need to say that that case never went to trial and thus is all allegedly. That’s not what was killing the church. It was that I couldn’t make them feel the same things as a narcissist. And that’s why they had to leave because they thought somehow that like, I had I had made God leave that God in Holy Spirit form, leave that place.
JUDE: Yes, your inability to conjure the Holy Spirit. Yeah. I think you said something about that in the podcast that I was listening to this afternoon, Emily, about, you know, like the difference between it being heightened emotion. Yeah. Just, you know, this is a really cool stirring kind of vibe just like going to a rock concert or a rave or it really is the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit can move us in lots of different ways. It can move us into stillness.
MUSICAL BREAK
TREY: Well, and for me to filter out and go, what’s the random firing is of my brain? What’s what? I like EDM music, and that’s fun because I do like EDM music. And that is fun. Right. Is it Jesus or is it EDM? Like these are important questions we always need to examine. And so like helps me like as someone who has always struggled with doubt Or who has made doubt my life right like helps me filter of like what is really going on here? versus what is like you know human group think EDM a really good news whatever like what like I that’s where I find a lot of my real like Holy divine moments, you know for me learning. I learned a lot about my faith by walking 500 miles across north of Spain because I walked the Camino di Santiago, because it was like, didn’t set out to find my faith. I set out to have an adventure because whatever, but like what I found was like, oh, in this rhythm of walking, in this stillness, in these like intentional conversations, now I can understand and feel my own version of what a divine connection is. But it took that stillness. It wasn’t going to happen in the heightened emotion. Yeah, yeah. And so, but we were or I was evil Incarnate Because I could not like you know oh, we’re so glad that you’re more moral than this other guy But we really thought you’d be better than this, and I’m just sitting there going What like it absolutely broke me? I? You know Had some of the worst depression of my life also by the way. I’m in a town of 20,000 people Where you can’t escape these people?
Right, like I now live in a city of six million, right? If I have someone who gets mouthy at me, can go anywhere else. I couldn’t escape them. And so you’re constantly running into them in the store, you know, at school events, or they will come to church outreach events, just whatever. And so that really Fkd me up, frankly, of…
Because some of it is coming off that baggage of like, I used to judge me for not being like able to get lost in the joyous emotion. It took years, maybe a decade to like build myself to place like, oh no, like this is cool. This is just how God uses me. And then 150 people dumped me. You know, it’s breakup conversations for six months about how, oh, I really just wish you could Emotionally manipulate me more when you’re like the pastor supposed to like be leading this thing And you’re there to like make this thing be healthy like you know your life is like trying You know theoretically is like trying to build healthy churches and all the ways that healthy means spiritually healthy But also just like operation like you know you’re kind of part spiritual guide part small business owner, right? You have to like watching like this. Yeah, right. Yeah , You’re being blamed for the rapid death of your small business because you won’t emotionally manipulate people. was for my own life. It was a real toxic combo of, know, I’m here at a new church. I’ve only been here three months.
And, you know, my therapist is like, TREY, these are not the same people. These are not the same people because I’m like, it’s going fine. Right. It’s going normal. And I’m like, When are they all going to leave? My therapist’s name is David. David, when are they all going to leave? When does the leaving start? And he’s like, that’s probably not going to happen. You’re just traumatized. I’m like, yes, David, I am traumatized.
JUDE: It sounds utterly traumatizing. as someone who lives with, you know, because I’m autistic, so I live with rejection, sensitivity, dysphoria. yeah, that would crucify me for months.
TREY: It hit me in the intersection of my ADHD and my depression, right? It was like, why this is the, you know, this is the stuff that I like. You naturally feel, you know, the heightened sense of because of my brain’s wiring. And and by the way, like, you know, I deeply desire for the for people to find spiritual health and belonging. And I’m being told that my very personality is why they can’t find spiritual health and belong. It’s fucking wild, man.
JUDE: Oh my word. Absolutely. I’m really feeling that for you. Yeah. And I’m glad you escaped.
TREY: Yeah. So the escaping was the other heart was the other thing that I think that Fkd me up. So Emily kind of talked about this. We both work and move in the United Methodist Church, which is a global denomination, but largely based here in US. And they were going through this whole like massive political split. And so we were working for some people that were bad actors, were just using their position to try and lead a separatist movement. in the midst of that, I come through like years now of therapy, got up the guts to say, hey, I need to live somewhere else. So I don’t want to get too much into denominational structure. It’s very boring. But the kind of pastor I am in the United Methodist Church, keep this in mind, the geographic range that I can occupy is about half the size of France. Our range in Texas is about 50 % the size of the nation of France. So anywhere, know, Bordeaux to Paris. I could be assigned. It’s not that interesting. It’s Houston to Texarkana. But if you want to just draw like on a map that people not in Texas might grasp.
And I go to my boss and go, hey, I need to not live in this town of 20,000 people. It’s literally killing me. Literally killing me. I need to go. You know, and like that took a lot of like work to advocate for myself and like stand up for my needs. And again, like it done like a lot of really good therapy work to do this. And my boss goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, no problem. Ask him again. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no problem. I go on paternity leave expecting to get a call like, hey, you’ll be moving. I get back from paternity leave, nothing happens. I call him and he was like, oh, well, well TREY, know, a good Methodist pastor is willing to stay forever and move at a moment’s notice, I don’t know. I don’t know what we’re gonna do. like, it took a whole other year to get out of this situation that was killing me with all these people just telling me, oh yeah, we just don’t, we just can’t. I know like, This is supposed to be like a mutual process, but like we did. You did sign up and say that you would live wherever we told you to live. And I’m like, consent is a problem in this version of this process. And so I ended up weeping along to escaping cult documentaries. So it’s what I did.
It was Leah Remini’s Escaping Scientology documentary. And I’m watching these stories of people who escaped the sea org. And I think I started watching this show because I thought it’d be a little schadenfreude of television. And I’m having this awakening of like, too am trapped by my religious system in a life that feels like prison. Yep. So thank you Leah Remini, weirdly shout outs to, you know, her multi-season Scientology documentary that I watched through COVID that really did change my life.
JUDE: Yeah. I’ve learned a lot from listening and watching to, you know, cult studies, you high control, high control religion type stuff, whatever you want to call it. It teaches you a lot about how religion can work in some subtle and not so subtle ways.
TREY: And talking about high control environments and the I don’t think the United Methodist Church sets out for it be that way. I just think that when being run by bad actors, it has an opportunity to feel a lot like a high control environment where you have a theology of calling, which I agreed with, that like the church doesn’t belong to the pastor, it belongs to God. And so the pastor is only there for a season in parts that doesn’t become that pastor’s church and becomes more about God and the community and less about your personality. Couldn’t agree with that more. But that can then be misused to say, hey, do what we say, or we’ll give you, we will alter the house you live in, the amount of money you make and the educational opportunities of your children. Right. And so when you have healthy leaders who understand the power they wield, this can be fine.
I have certainly had good life experiences in it, where I have felt really like my needs taken, like where I am now, Like where my needs really were taken into account. And I was like, oh, okay, cool. I’m glad y’all see that in me like this can be really healthy or it can feel like you were a member of the Scientology Sea org who have all this control over me Trying to hijack this thing that I love To exclude people that I love it was you know that those combination of factors and that kind of generation of church leadership quite frankly Fkd me up and my own like We talk about on our shows like people are churchgoers people who are nuns not NUNs- NONEs and Those with no religion and those who are DONEs those who had a religion and left it and so somehow out of all of these experiences I am a pastor who is kind of a done right I am both leading a church and kind of done not but but And this is like where my own spiritual work is right now, not done with God, done often with the people claiming to represent God.
JUDE: Yes. And I think the best ministers come out of that. I really do. I think the best ministries happen in those spaces, in those transitional, weird, messy, Fkd up spaces.
TREY: Yeah, because we understand the messy and the Fkd up. I’m not OK with this. Well, and you run the numbers and there are a lot of people out there going, I feel something spiritual in my soul, but y’all seem like utter bullshit and I can go. Yes, same.
JUDE: I could not agree more to both of those statements. the Christians, this will be audio only so I’m doing scare quotes for the listeners, the Christians who tell us that empathy is toxic, those Christians. can completely understand why someone would not want to be associated or aligned with that.
TREY: Yeah, Jesus was all about empathy. It’s utterly I mean, yeah, there is no understanding it. It is like, know. Like what religion are you practicing? like, yeah, I have spent, you know, good chunk of my life in this church being told I don’t care enough about scripture, and I sit here and go, yeah, but like The image of God I find in scripture is fine in scripture. I with some caveats, I go, OK, yeah, no, I see what you people writing thousands of years ago were trying to get at. And then I look at, you know, many of God’s representatives, even within my own little, you know, faith world. And I go, what book did you read? Like, what are we doing? What is that?
EMILY: Mm hmm. And so much of what we do with our podcasts and with talking to other people and so much of what you have done I know I love the work that you do and is Talking to those people and saying okay. So why are you a done? Or why are you not yet a done? Because you could look at stories like mine and TREY’s and go why didn’t you just leave? But we talk about people, you know, there were prophets that spoke from within the temple and from without the temple, right? Those who are advocating for change from within the temple walls. And so I feel very called to that space still, because even though a lot of what we do is apologize on behalf of the crimes of the church, I feel like that is a needed space for us to do. That’s a needed voice. There needs to be somebody apologizing and saying, no, no, no, we can be better.do differently. We’re Christians, but we’re not like that.
TREY: Right. Right. tired of the not like having to say the not like that.
JUDE: We should get T-shirts printed.
TREY: I want to get like a stole for my clergy robes that literally just reads Christian, but not like that. Like all the way around.
MUSICAL BREAK
TREY: I didn’t leave. And not just because of the Stockholm Syndrome, but because there is something really powerful when this can happen in a healthy way. Where a church can be the thing that it’s meant to be, which is a collective space where we find spiritual meaning, learn, challenge, support, love, hold accountable, form really healthy communities where the only membership requirement to that community is show up with a desire to be a part of that community. When we can do that, this can be a real, this has been a really powerful thing in my life. And what keeps me going in this muck is A, I’m not sure there’s any place without muck. That’s just the reality of humanity.
EMILY: The other piece is when this works, it is something truly beautiful. and deeply needed in the world. It’s just, we often find fascinating new and terrible ways to fuck it up. And specifically in that congregation, I think we were able to create those spaces. Yes, yes. I remember it was before you had been appointed there, TREY, it was after all of this mess had happened, everything was on fire. everything was falling apart. It was didn’t even have the Wi-Fi password. It was awful. It was awful. And I remember looking at my spouse and saying, okay, do we stay, or do we go? Like, do we stay and help put out this fire and right the ship in this congregation in this setting? Or do we go, and we find somewhere else to worship and we just abandon it? And we had a hard conversation of we gotta help right the ship. This is where God’s called us. And I think that by the end of your tenure there, we were able to create really beautiful spaces for people who were in the margins, right? For our youth who needed a space specifically in that county, which is very intolerant of their lifestyle to be accepted, right? So there were good, wonderful moments in that context, but we had to carve them out tooth and nail some days fighting for those spaces to exist.
TREY: You know, it’s the it’s our, you know, our beloved ex meth dealer sound, you know, ex meth ex meth dealer, ex drug addict, ex Wicca sound guy, you know, who would, you know, show up to church in bear claw slippers. But, you know, absolutely just found a community where he could both find joy and find it sober. And that was like, oh, it can be like this. And I’m like, yeah, bro, it can be like this. I also nearly drowned baptizing him because he is much larger than me. And we were doing full immersion baptism in a swimming pool. And I got pinned underneath him and could not come back up for air.
JUDE: Oh, my word. It was a sacrifice for your ministry.
TREY: I also hate being wet just pathologically.
JUDE: I’m an Anglican. We don’t we don’t do that.
TREY: It’s safer. Dunking is dangerous.
JUDE: I had a little dribble over the over the head. Yeah. No, that’s not quite true because the evangelical wing of the Church of England, They do full immersion baptism.
TREY: Us being Methodists, we’re like, hey, whatever. You want water on the head? You want to die in a swimming pool? All of these options are available to you. Just only do it once.
JUDE: One of the people I interviewed for Fkd up by faith way back in the beginning was baptized four times.
TREY: You gotta make sure it sticks, right? Just keep dunking them until it sticks. That sounds healthy. I think that was the idea. It’s like, you know, no, you’re not, no, you’re not saved yet. We need to do it again. You are not saved enough.
JUDE@ I’ve been thinking a lot about baptism recently and, and part of me would quite like to experience it. But my theology is like, I don’t think that’s really, you know, yeah, I don’t think that would be very cool. But could maybe could I go through like a mock baptism…
TREY: I will like push, push the bounds of what’s technically allowed with that. We’re like, we’re only we’re not rebaptizing you, but I’m going to use a lot more water than I’m supposed to use at a remembrance. You know, you know, we live in a kind of a default Baptist evangelical culture where that is like, you know, you can get dunked every week if you want to and folks come in looking for something really genuine, which is like they want to like recommit their lives to something else. And they want they want to have that like ritual component that helps mark their finding their way back home, which cool. Yeah, rad. Absolutely.
And then you have to disappoint them because what they want is they want to be rebaptized because that’s just the world that they know. And so we just end up doing like re-remembrances of baptism. But I’m going to use like a lot of water, and this will probably get you where this is like a middle ground between what I can do because of important theological commitments that I hold to. But like also, you know, like a pastoral care like What you want is really genuine and awesome. And I don’t want to create this like weird barrier, which like, well, I’m sorry, we don’t do that. Like, what are what are we a country club? Like, whatever. No, you can.
JUDE: Yeah, I had a yeah, I don’t know quite what they call it in the Church of England, but I had a baptismal kind of big anniversary last year and because I was baptized an adult. And so we did, there’s a whole blessing that the priest can do on your baptismal anniversary, Jubilee. And it involved quite a lot of water.
TREY: yeah, was baptized as I was six months old. you know, I have no although apparently, I was like…
JUDE: checking out the sinners in the congregation?
TREY: Oh yeah, all of you sinners, gather round, gather round.
JUDE: Were you baptized as a baby, Emily?
EMILY: So I was actually baptized, we didn’t start going to church until I was in the third grade, so think I was nine or ten.
JUDE: Do you remember choosing, or were you kind of like, we’re a member of a church now, so this is what we’re going to do.
EMIY: Right. So I think I did choose beforehand, or I had like accepted Christ as my Lord and Savior beforehand at summer camp at an altar call, you know, like you do in the hyper-emotional state. But it was real. And then the following year, I got baptized with my siblings. So.
JUDE: And was it a dunking or was it a sprinkling?
EMILY: It was a sprinkling. But then later in youth group we did, was a baptism party slash pool party.
TREY: God bless the 2000s.
EMILY: It was remembering your baptism if you hadn’t yet been baptized but if you had or if you’d already been baptized but if you hadn’t yet been baptized you could get baptized then. All got baptized or, you know, remembered our baptism and then had a pool party.
JUDE: Was it simultaneous in this? Like, were you all in the pool? No, so. Yeah, I’m actually really interested in this logistics.
EMILY: I think they did the people who had not yet been baptized yet got baptized first. then they. Individually. And then they kind of stayed to the side of the pool. And then we all got in and remembered our baptism together. And then we had to.
TREY: But was this like was there like a like a water gun?
EMILY: No, it was like, OK, now go under the water like you. Oh, OK. So that’s like under the water. 3, 2, 1, everyone under the water. Yeah, we all did just like a collective cannonball under the water and then had a full party.
TREY: Oh, it was a very interesting theology. But I think next time if we ever do this, which we won’t is line everybody up along the pool and then have them all flop backwards in the water. So it like cannonball, like synchronized swimming. Just yes, everybody dive in at the same time. It would save a lot of time.
JUDE: I sometimes show up to an evangelical service just to wave my hands in the air. But the last time I went to, it just happened to be a baptism day and all these teenagers, there must have been about, I don’t know, 15 of them. And when you’re watching one after the other, it starts to get a little bit tedious. The idea of a collective pool party baptism sounds really cool. I’m sure there are many theological reasons as to why that could not happen. there you go.
We’ve gone on to baptism, which is a nice diversion. So I’m curious about the pool party baptism. Was it, do you, do you bless the water?
So it was basically a swimming pool of holy water.
TREY: Yeah. Yeah. So the liturgy, so the liturgy has like the prayer over the water, which is the like, you know, I, you know, pray for the water and you know, those are receiving. And so yeah, you would, yeah. Uh, presumably logistically that whole pool was not only full of chlorine, but also the Holy Spirit.
JUDE: And if you didn’t desacralize it or whatever it is you meant to do afterwards, presumably it still is.
TREY: certainly, you know, Methodist theology around baptism or around sacraments in general is they can’t be undone. This is part of where we get like the baptized ones and why we have to return communion elements to nature. Yes, rather than just throw that we either consume them or can return them to nature. You can’t just throw them away because they have been they are still a sacrament. And so theoretically that pool is now just Holy water. I wonder if they know As is the lake we I mean when we baptize someone in a lake, this is yeah Palestine we’ve done baptisms and lakes and all sorts of places that we have Made sacred still sacred.
Oh, that’s neat. I can see myself going down a massive rabbit hole with this. Yeah, of like, or then this, mean, this is, this is what we’re doing is basically our version of Jewish midrash, right? Like, so you take this rule that you understand, and then you start to, as theologians expand out, what are the edge cases of this rule? And so where we are is, okay, so if we believe that a sacrament cannot be undone. What happens when you bless a lake? Does that lake remain permanently blessed? What happens with the river? Now, the water molecules in a river are never stable, right? There is just a constant nature of river, right? It’s constant torrent of water. And so it is just it just that moment in the river or is that entire river? How much of that river? These are like not actually important questions, but my brain spirals in this direction. I think I mean, there are.
Jude: Some theologians who would consider these to be deeply ontological questions. Also near me, because we live quite near the sea, they do baptisms in the sea, like and of course all the seas are connected. So basically the ocean.
TREY: Holy water. Theoretically, right. Like, know, we did this also starts to get at the like the limits of our legalism. Right? This really shows that like, well, you can’t do that because this like, okay, guys, but does that mean that based on what you said that like, because someone blessed the ocean once all the oceans of the world or am I like a video game character where like I have a certain radius of power? Like, what is my you know, what is my range of this move?
I’m just going to D &D, right? Like how many spaces on the board does my baptism power hold? Like how much how much like is it just as far as your voice carries? And that’s how far the Holy Spirit goes to bless the water. And then after that, once the sound dies out, you’re no longer right. And this is where we get to step back and remember that a lot of this is quasi made up and that’s okay. And it’s all right. It’s all right. We can all chill out just a touch because the harder you pull on this, the faster it unravels because we will then have to define like, like, you know,
I because, know, as the type of pastor that I am right, I have sacramental authority. But so now when I select sacramental authority for my move bar, I now will all I’m going to see is like a blue circle of this is the this is the potential impact. And like if I become like a higher-ranking pastor, do bishops have a wider move? Is that how this works? Yes.
EMILY: Yeah, I would. I would go along with that. Yes. Let’s make that canon.
TREY: Yeah. Yeah, let’s do it. Yeah. It might not need this to go 20. If you need this to go 24 spaces, you’re going to need a level up to a bishop. You’re to have to grind for a while, friends.
JUDE: The truth is, we’ve struck on something which is really true. It might as well be. It might as well be a game. Yeah. It might as well be.
It’s because it is deeply performative. It’s deeply, yes, so it’s deeply codified. You need to know what the rules are. Right. And you need to know the edges of your authority. Otherwise, someone’s going to show you or put you back in the box or whatever. And so, yes, you know, we’re using game language and I’m sure someone’s written their PhD thesis about exactly that.
TREY: I would read that. I would.
JUDE: And I’m going to go and look it up after we stop talking. Absolutely. The gamification of liturgy. I’m sure someone has. I’m sure I’ve even seen that somewhere.
TREY: gotta be. Well, I think part of why I go to Dungeons and Dragons because it’s just a game I love. But all Dungeons and Dragons is trying to do is capture the systems that humans build and represent that in game logic. And this is one of those like, you know, and part of how I get Fkd up is like, well, I’m this kind of pastor, which is not this kind of pastor, which is not this kind of pastor, you know? And so as this kind of pastor, I have this kind of move set and I don’t have this kind of move set and I’m never gonna have this kind of move set, whatever.
And it is important, again, part of part of the like the soul searching that I am doing at this part of my life is to remind myself that every time Jesus runs up against like the D &D version of church of like, how can you say that? Or, oh, you eat with sinners or, oh, I’m the high priest and I’m going to kill you now. Psych, I’m not staying dead. Jesus seems to utterly reject that.
Mm-hmm. This is they’ve just told the Easter story in the least faithful way possible like it’s like hi Rome and the temple You think you have all authority on heaven and earth psych. I’m God
CLOSING MUSIC
You’ve been listening to Fkd Up by Faith with me, Jude Mills. Our music is by David Goodall, and you can find the podcast on Spotify and all major podcast channels. If you would like to take part in the podcast or you know someone who would be an awesome guest, please do get in touch. You can do that via my website, judemills.com forward slash podcast. I look forward to hearing from you. Go well.
I am delighted to release new episode and indeed a whole new season of Fkd Up By Faith! I had a great conversation in this episode with Ann Russo (she/her). Ann is a licensed clinical social worker, mental health advocate, educator, and thought leader specializing in addressing complex and often stigmatized topics such as religious trauma, sexual empowerment, ethical non-monogamy, queer identity, and inclusivity in mental health. We talked about religious trauma, the LGBTQ+ community, the current US political climate and its impacts, and Julian of Norwich’s cat!
Episode Transcript
00:11 Opening Music – by David Goodall
Welcome to Fucked Up By Faith, my name’s Jude Mills. In this podcast we have conversations with people who’ve been fucked up by their faith and we explore how they’ve found hope, healing, reconciliation and forgiveness in or out of their faith tradition.
J – My guest today is Ann Russo who is joining me from New York State – across the pond. I am delighted to welcome Ann to the podcast because she specializes, she’s a psychotherapist who specializes in religious trauma, which is a subject, as you know, I’m really interested in.
J – Welcome Anne to the podcast. It’s really good to have you here.
A – Hi, Jude. Thank you so much. I’m excited to be here today and talk about religion. Both of our favourite topics. Absolutely.
J – I should explain to the listeners that we had a go at this yesterday and it was a little bit disastrous due to my not recognizing that the daylight saving had happened in America. It hasn’t happened here in the UK yet. It’s happening just tonight actually. And also my internet connection was… So here we are once again. Technology appears to be on our side. Touchwood.
A – It does.
J – Okay. And I’m just going to ask you the question I ask everybody, which is, were you fucked up by your faith?
A – In my life, I wasn’t raised within a faith. I was baptized Catholic when I was little. then very little, like three weeks, right? And then when I was five, my dad came out as part of the LGBTQ community. And when that happened, we just didn’t have faith. Now at this time, I didn’t really understand why, but as I started to get older, I realized that the people that my family was most in fear of rejection were people of faith. Unfortunately, at this time there was a lot of talk shows on and you’d have the, you had the moral majority here in the United States and they were very much against homosexuals. So I learned at a very young age to really be afraid of people of faith.
So whenever I would meet someone of faith, would feel, you know, I think looking at it now as a psychotherapist, I realized that it was a trauma response because my body would tense right up. You know, I wouldn’t want to talk to them. I felt automatically shame and guilt and like I was going to be rejected by these people and I wanted to get away from them. Now, whether or not that was actually true of every person, likely not, but that’s what faith meant to me or when someone said God or I’m a Christian, it was a buzzword automatically of someone who was gonna dislike me and my family. And as I got a bit older, I got more curious about religion. I got more curious about theology. Why do these people hate us? I don’t understand.
You know, and that question had never really been posed to my family. Like, well, let’s look at the scripture. Like that never happened. You know, it was just, they don’t like us. We stay away from them. So on my own, I started to look at the Bible and try to understand it and what was going on there. And then when I was 18, I met some folks that said they were not Christian. They were in relationship with Jesus.
Okay. At the time I didn’t really know what that means, but what I know that means now is actually a very strong sense of literal interpretation of the Bible and a very strict adherence to conservative principles and high control within that faith. Didn’t know that. So I joined this church and in the process of Initially participating as 18 year olds do I fell very hard for another member of the church and she was He she was a she mm-hmm and while the feeling was Very mutual this deep connection that we had she was very much believing that Having those feelings or engaging in any kind of romantic relationship would be sinful and against God and that came from family, that came from the church. And while I still enjoyed going to the church, as strange as this may sound, I still went because I wanted to understand. I still did not get it, right? So I would talk to the pastor, I would talk to the worship leader, I even went to an ex-gay ministry not to be ex-gay myself But like what is it that they’re teaching? Like what is it that they’re believing? Where is this coming from? Right? It just did not make sense to me and the more I explored the more Their interpretation of things did not make sense to me.
I went on and got a bachelor’s degree in religious studies I got a master’s in theology and I was looking looking looking for the answer and I feel like the answer did come for me and it was not just through deep study. It was through contextualization, history, culture and letting go in many ways. And the woman that I’m speaking of, she went on to live a straight life and that always broke my heart, that is what happened because of the pressures of the church and the faith. So my fucked up-ness comes from by proxy in a sense. Like it wasn’t so much of what I was believing, but it was what people around me were believing and how that impacted me in my sense of uncertainty and bringing up parts of shame and confusion.
And it stayed with me for a long time. And I didn’t even necessarily realize that I had experienced religious trauma because I felt like, well, religious trauma happens to people that are really in the religion or really deeply believe in all these pieces. But through my own work, I realized, no, like, you can experience religious trauma from the outside because you’re impacted by that religion. even, you know, to this day, I work very hard to, when someone says they’re religious or they’re Christian, I work very hard to not hold my own judgment or my own fears because of the experience that I had in the past.
J – So you’ve come to work with people through your psychotherapy practice who have experienced religious trauma and that’s a spectrum, right? Yes. It’s something that I always try to hold is that what some people might understand as trauma looks very different. It can be something which looks from the outside to be quite minor whixh actually can cut really deep.
A – Yes. Yes.
J – so was it always your intention to work with religious trauma or did it, did it kind of seep into your practice as you developed it?
A – My intention with the practice was always that. Yeah. I didn’t intend to study religion or even be a therapist The situation at you know, eight eighteen in my early twenties it completely shifted my life trajectory You know, was very it was the level of impact for me and I’m grateful that it did actually because I feel like I’m getting to really support folks that have been impacted by participating in high control faith and really looking at sexuality and gender and just sex in general and what’s taught within religion and how that impacts people. And one of the things that I also feel is important that I do in my practice as well is some people want to remain in faith. know, and how do we navigate what that looks like as well. So I feel really like excited really that I have the ability to do that because of having a master’s in theology and a master’s in therapy. And I’m really trying to train other therapists to be able to do this work too because it really is quite nuanced.
J – When we had her or interrupted conversation yesterday, we kind of got to this point where we were saying that having this background in theology, I came to do my Masters in theology for pretty much the same reasons. I felt I needed to understand more deeply the theological background so that I could meet people where they were and to be able to put things into context.
A – Yes.
J – Yeah. And obviously you’re working quite a lot with the LGBTQ community.
A – I’m so grateful that there are so many affirming churches and the challenge with some of that too is when someone’s not from an affirming church. A lot of my clients as they’re trying to navigate out of a more high control church. It can be really difficult for them to go to an affirming church because doctrine is still pretty strict and this affirming church doesn’t make sense to them. that message about themselves, that negative message about themselves has been reinforced for years and years. it definitely takes time, but I am very happy that even in the past 20 years or so I’ve seen a big change. Yeah. Huge change. but still an epidemic. Absolutely. And I don’t want to dismiss the level of the work that still needs to be done here, though, of course.
J – Sure. I think I probably don’t need to guess that with a lot of what we’re seeing happening politically in the US right now, that a lot of people are really worried.
A – Yeah, understandably. And that can, that can trigger previous trauma, you know, when we’re hearing a lot of the kind of the sort of Christian nationalist rhetoric, for example. Yeah. mean, Jude, you know, candidly speaking, there’s a lot of my clients that have safety plans on how to get out the classroom. People are very scared. They’re very, very scared. They are absolutely walking around in trauma, just consistently being traumatized. Everyone’s trying to navigate how much of the news you watch and pay attention to. How do you take care of your own mental health? And what do you need to know if you need to flee? mean, it’s a deeply unfortunate time for minorities, honestly, I mean, even with what we’re seeing with I don’t even want to say immigrants, because it’s happening to citizens, people of colour.
J – Yep. And, you know, I’m watching it from several thousand miles away and feeling it. Feeling that knot in my belly, you know, that fear. And I begin to imagine how it feels actually being there.
A – Yeah. It’s, you know, it’s embarrassing in some ways. I get that. Yes. You know, as it’s. We’re on the world stage and I’m not and I don’t want to necessarily demonize everyone that voted for the current administration because everyone’s fed so many different stories and it can be very confusing and complicated Hmm, but I but I would hope that people can see That harming others whether you agree with them or not should is not part of Liberty and justice and freedom for all
J – I think also I like to be reminded of how the United States has the most wonderful record of protest, civil rights activism. And that history is still there and that activism is still there and people are allowing their voices to be heard and taking a lot of risks in some cases. So I think I hold my faith there that this is in your, it’s in the cultural DNA.
A – Yeah, there is definitely a lot of fight. There’s definitely a lot of fight going on. And yes, 100 % is exactly what I’m hoping for and having faith in that too, that we can turn some of this around. And also the arc of history more globally, this sort of stuff rears its ugly head every now and again, but it doesn’t last. people, the majority of people don’t want it. Yeah. They don’t want it. So. That’s a really good point to remember.
16:29 MUSIC – “Nebula” by Penguin Music on Pixabay
You know, I think if we were able to, and like I said, you know, I talked to people that vote in the other direction and it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s funny. It’s like the exact same thing as we were talking about earlier. When I went to those like ex-gay ministries, right? When I was involved in that church, it’s the same principle that I’m following. Why do you believe what you believe? Help me understand what you actually believe. So I can just get a better, you know, I have a better way to communicate to you and maybe even find some empathy and compassion and build relationship. mean, it’s a, it’s the same philosophy.
J – Yeah. And, and you mentioned that a little while ago that what people believe is very much based on what they see and what they see and what they’re immersed in. people who come from those, those you call them high control religions, That is how that’s the lens through which they see the world and their exposure to other ideas is really limited. I’ve spoken to other guests on this show and it does seem quite particular to the United States. People who grew up in really conservative evangelical situations and I ask them, how was it to be in that? That’s how they describe it. Like that is the entire lens through which we see everything. And to break out of it is incredibly, it’s not just difficult. It’s not even something they know is possible.
A – Yes. Yes. Yes, exactly. And to even get to the place where you recognize it’s possible you are forfeiting your friends a lot of times, your family or support community. mean, it’s there so to this. Not just, I’m changing some of the ways I believe in God or the different ways I have faith.
J – Yeah. And if you have heard it from when you were tiny, PRE-verbal even, you know, if at some point you’re all going to be raptured or there’s a possibility that you might go to hell. These ideas are terrifying. If you’ve heard them from when you’re very small, they are sewn into your fabric.
A – Exactly, exactly. And trying to navigate away from that is so difficult. you know, I met a pastor yesterday, and she’s actually a priest of an Episcopal church there. And it’s a very affirming church. And we were talking and she was raised in what she describes as a high control religion. And even, you know, going to college, you go to a Christian college that believes the same thing. You go back to a community that believes the same thing. So it’s like very difficult to move out of out of that belief system. And she was saying that there was certain exposure that she had to different things that she was very interested in learning and reading and some things just started to not add up for her. But it took a very long time to navigate through that. And then on top of it there are still moments of challenge because that messaging was so reinforced that you have to, in a sense, almost continuously remind yourself and expose yourself to something different. just keep getting pulled back into that high control perspective.
J – I sometimes imagine how it would have been if I had grown up in that. And would I have been able to find my way out of it.
A – Um, I mean, that’s something I never know the answer to, but I do imagine it sometimes. I can see, I can see why you would, I, you know, it’s like the, if I was born in this period, what kind of person would I be? Would I be fighting? Like one of the things that like, think about, and I, I think if you look at your personality, this is what I, this is kind of what I was thinking about. Well, you know, I always wondered, what would I have been like in 1860 US, you know, where would I be? And I look at who I am today and the pushback that I’m giving now, and I think that was always me. You know, like it’s always on the side of humans. Like it’s always on the side of the least, the treated people that are treated the least, you know, well, and you probably would be where you are now, but your path probably would have been quite different.
J – I think I know the answer if I was here in the Middle Ages I would be a nun. would be, because nuns got to read, learn to read and have access to books.
A – My gosh, and there’s beautiful writings from nuns in that time period as well. Just incredible writings.
J – The first book in English ever, by a woman, was written by Julian of Norwich. And she was an anchoress – you essentially get bricked up in a room, in a sealed room for life.
A – Oh, wow. Wow. Wow.
J – She had a cat. And one of my favourite stained-glass windows has the picture of Julian and her cat.
A – Oh, I love that. Oh my gosh. That’s isn’t that incredible when you think about it? my goodness. Yeah. And that, and that’s the part of, of faith that I hope to see a smooth to like, like when you talk, like thinking back to when people said it’s a relationship with Jesus, right? Like, writing like that speaks to a relationship with Jesus. And so I’m down for the relationship with Jesus. It’s just, is it a relationship with Jesus?
J – You don’t want an abusive relationship with Jesus. That’s not what Jesus was about at all.
A – Exactly. Exactly. That’s one of the things that I, know, my clients that are still interested in remaining in faith and even some that aren’t. But there is another perspective. always have them go check out stuff, just go read about Jesus.
J- The writings that other people have written about Jesus can be very revelatory. I’ve been writing about ethics recently.
A – Love it.
J – But the ethics of podcasting for people like me, for scholars, theologians. And so one of the things I said was that theologians, unlike people who are in the social sciences, we don’t have a habit of declaring our positionality. And I think that’s fundamental. So would you want to talk to me if I was a Bible-based Christian podcaster?
A – It would be a very different conversation for sure.
J – But yeah, if I hadn’t declared upfront or if you didn’t know upfront what my my thing is. And I think probably the name of the podcast suggests that I’m not a Bible-based Christian.
A – Yeah, yes, yes, yes. But absolutely, because with especially LGBTQ folks or people that have been harmed by religion. Totally it’s going to impact immediately. It’s going to set off that trigger of trauma. Yeah. I don’t like it’s the assumption is going to be that it’s going to be a difficult, painful experience.
J – Exactly. And sometimes I kind of want to say from the off when I meet people, you know, I’m not that sort of Christian.
A – Yeah. Before we get started. Yeah. I get it because like I was saying to you earlier, if someone says I’m a Christian, or they have a cross, anything like that is an immediate internal recoil. Not because I don’t have respect for what I see as Christianity, but the fear is that you’re a Christian who is gonna reject me or hate me because of my sexual orientation. Or that I have to show up in a way that is not authentic in order to keep myself safe. mean, there’s so many moving pieces to that. It can be very slippery.
J – A lot of the people I’ve spoken to, and I’m sure you as well, they have been to churches which say they are affirming and welcoming or, you know, inclusive or whatever the words that they might use. And it turns out they’re really not. And that can double down on trauma. I mean, yeah, that’s dreadful. Horrible experience, as I’ve heard about.
A – Think about entering a space to be with God, really. And that space is now unsafe for you. So something that should have been a vulnerable, loving moment becomes a unsafe, scary space of rejection.
J – And the worst part of it for me, they’re all worse parts, the worst part of it, I I think is that it is said or done in the name of God or in the name of Christ. I can’t even begin to express how that feels in my soul because Christ didn’t reject anybody.
Nope.
27:00 – MUSIC – “Nebula” by Penguin Music on Pixabay
A – That’s bring people back to Christ all the time because this is a religion founded on Christ So let’s let’s look at who this individual was. Mm-hmm truly who was this person, know and it It astounds me That well, there’s always a sadly. I mean, there’s always a group that’s oppressed
And right now it’s LGBTQ in religion. But when I look back at the way scripture was used again back in US times of enslaving people, the Bible was used to justify it as well. exactly. So sadly, God’s name, Jesus’ name has been used to harm a lot of people.
J – it still is. I’m just going to take a breath because when I start to feel that in my body, it becomes quite uncomfortable.
A – You know what? I think that it’s okay to remind us, the people that are doing the work to help others that this is still the reality for many people. And there’s support around now that didn’t necessarily exist in the same way before. Yeah. Bless you. you. So it’s just keep praying for the positive and in realizing that there are there’s a lot of fighters out there. And you know, we just got to do our part, really the end of the day. Yes, we’re all worthy of love and being loved, loving and being loved.
J – Absolutely. something I always have to remind myself is that it’s what my part is. Because we each have our gifts to offer. And there are people who are the out on the street banner waving activists. There are the people who are educators. There are the people who are therapists and carers and who deliver the medicine. There are the artists and the creators and we all have a really, really important part to play in this big picture. And I’m really so grateful for the people who are brave and go out on the streets and do that. Yes. I’m so grateful, but it doesn’t mean that those of us who are doing other stuff, not doing something really important as well.
A – Absolutely. Absolutely. It takes, it does take a village. I mean, it takes a global village.
J – And what’s also really wonderful about having these conversations and the fact that these conversations go out on the internet to be heard by is that they bolster us as practitioners. Yes. But it also bolsters other people who hear it. I am not alone in this. And we kind of know that intellectually, don’t we? know that there are millions of people around the world who feel like we do.
A -Yes, exactly. it’s good to hear it.
J – It’s good to hear it in your ears. We are here. We know what’s happening. We know how you feel and we care. And we’re here for you to reach out to if you need it.
A – Yes, absolutely. 100%.
J – What I find so… powerful and heartening about your, I was going to say your ministry, because it feels to me like it’s a ministry. It’s a practice because you’re a professional psychotherapist, is that you can bring that context to your clients. Yeah. And it comes back to what I said earlier, I don’t know how it would be if I had grown up in any of these traditions. I know how it is to have conversations with people who did.
A – And this idea that they have to choose, that’s the other part that always gets me. If you don’t practice this way, then you can’t practice. How do you just dismiss an entire belief about God? And I just, it’s never made sense to me. It’s a false choice, especially for LGBTQ people that are Christian to have to like, to choose. Oh, that’s both as an identity to a point.
J – Yeah. And this is why I started looking at spiritual abuse because I’ve that that is fundamentally abusive. I mean, there’s a bit of a debate here as to what we mean by spiritual abuse. It’s legally defined as psychological abuse that’s done in a religious or spiritual context. I think it’s much more fundamental and visceral than that. I think spiritual abuse is about something which cuts to the soul of a person. If you are severing them from their spiritual life, that’s…It’s a fundamental evil.
A – It is. It is. is. One of the things I try really hard because with. So if I work with clients sometimes and I’ll work with families that are, you know, they have their still there, they’re strong, more conservative beliefs and fine, fine. But when they’re trying to work with their kids or understand their kids. What is, I find come up a lot is, well, if you’re part of the LGBTQ community, that means that you’re gonna be promiscuous. That means that you’re gonna be unsafe. That means you’re gonna have mental health problems. That means that you’re gonna have substance abuse problems. And they quote the same studies that I would quote, except the problem here is that they’re missing how we get there. It’s not due to having an LGBTQ identity, it is due to the abuse that you receive by others for having an LGBTQ community. People cannot be rejected and shamed just because they exist and you expect them to be able to function in the healthiest way. The level of resilience that you have to have to be part of the LGBTQ or a minority group or marginalized group is unbelievable. And then to put it on them like, well, look you’re gay, so you have a substance abuse and a mental health problem because you’re gay. mean, there’s just so many elements that we have to fight back. one of those very important to try to educate folks that are open to looking at those studies and you say, where is that coming from? Is it actually coming from the identity or is it coming from the rejection from your community?
J – And all the other sort of systemic issues that come from having a marginalized identity. You get similar arguments when it comes to the social determinants of health, don’t you? That’s the idea that it comes down to people’s choices and not necessarily the environment in which they are living and the systemic injustices that they are constantly facing.
A – And I mean, I suppose that it’s easier to do that, right? Yes. This is your fault. Yeah. But we get nowhere. Like we have to, exactly. Like we have to look at the systems at play. And that just hurts me so much when I see that and trying to explain to people rejection causes this, rejection. And what’s so fascinating is most of these parents are really trying to help. Like they really believe that this is what’s going to become of you. And I need to that it doesn’t and and what’s so sad is they’re reinforcing the rejection. Yeah You know, so I mean it’s it’s it is I feel like it’s so simple yet. It’s so complicated. You’re trying to cut through layers and layers and layers of no understanding.
One foot in front of the other, right, Jude?
J – Yep. Yes. One of the things that I really wanted for this podcast, as well as being about being fucked up by faith, was that we move towards hope, healing, reconciliation, forgiveness, all of the words. Hope can be difficult for people to cling on to. But Hope is in what I said earlier on in the deepest understanding of who we are as human beings and what we can be. And most people, I believe, are trying to do the right thing.
A – Me too.
J – So what if you were to leave us with any words of hope? What would they be?
A – I said it a little bit earlier, but I want to say it again because it’s really been ringing in my head. You deserve to be loved and cared for and to be able to love and care for others. That’s it. Yeah.
J – Thank you.
A – Thank you.
38:20 – Closing Music – by David Goodall
You’ve been listening to Fucked Up by Faith with me Jude Mills. Our music is by David Goodall and you can find the podcast on Spotify and all major podcast channels. If you would like to take part in the podcast or you know someone who would be an awesome guest, please do get in touch. You can do that via my website judemills.com forward slash podcast. I look forward to hearing from you. Go well.
Links Ann’s website https://www.annrusso.org Ann’s practice website https://www.amrtherapy.com/ Julian of Norwich https://julianofnorwich.org/pages/who-is-julian-of-norwich
Music Title music by David Goodall Incidental music “Nebula” by Penguin Music on Pixabay
Hello, welcome to this episode of UNFKD, the bonus series of my podcast Fucked Up by Faith, where I explore theological and theology-adjacent ideas which are harmful, or misunderstood, or just plain wrong. I’m Jude Mills.
And here we are at the beginning of February, and my word didn’t January feel like it lasted forever? Possibly, well, almost certainly because of the past two weeks when we have seen the new president of the United States of America attempting to… how should we describe it? …wreak havoc might be a good way of describing it…with democracy and with human rights.
So, today’s episode is dedicated to all my friends who live in the United States of America.
Now I know that those of you who listen to this podcast will have seen and heard the prayer delivered by Episcopal Bishop Marianne Edgar Budde who a couple of weeks ago in the National Cathedral in Washington spoke directly to President Donald Trump and in her address she asked him to show mercy. And her particular plea was to LGBTQ plus people and migrants. This is what she said or a little bit of what she said.
“Millions have put their trust in you. (This is her speaking to the president) And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in democratic, republican and independent families. Some who fear for their lives.”
So her message, her plea for mercy has, it would seem gone unheeded. A slew of executive orders have targeted migrants and LGBTQ plus people.Those which look at gender issues have had a particular emphasis on the rights of trans and non-binary people and much of what we have seen is essentially erasure. So I’ve spoken about this many times on this podcast and on other people’s podcasts and I will say it again. This issue is the hill that I will die on. And so this episode is equally dedicated to trans and non-binary people in the USA and elsewhere who are feeling very frightened right now. Let’s be very clear.
Targeting and vilifying a minority group is straight out of the fascist playbook. It cannot be repeated often enough. It is not hyperbole.
MUSICAL BREAK
Bishop Budde’s message was shared widely and her image and her words have been used in memes and in social media posts by Christian and non-Christian liberals and progressives across social media. And as you might expect, it’s also been shared by people who don’t approve of her message. And in particular those people who describe themselves as “Christian nationalists”, completely lost their minds about it. They claimed that she was preaching what they called, quote, “toxic empathy”, or that she was committing, quote, “the sin of empathy” and that her message was somehow unbiblical and all the other nonsense that they claim in the name of Christ. Now some of the venom and the hatred that I have seen pointed at the bishop by other so-called Christians has actually had me questioning my own theological stance and wondering if Satan might actually be real.
So, in delivering her message in the National Cathedral directly to the President (and he was not amused as you probably saw) she was more than just speaking truth to power, which one might argue is the role of someone in a position of seniority in the Church.
She was speaking truth to power and that was important and brave. And it was also, I think, more than a message of hope. Although it was a message of hope to people who might be beginning to think that hope might be losing in this scenario.
It was both of those things. But I also believe that it was a call to action. Now it wasn’t overt. She wasn’t actually rallying Christians around her, but it was there – and you have to know how to read between the lines. Progressive and liberal Christians, and indeed all Christians who don’t align with Christian nationalism, will have heard her, as I did. And they will have started to think about what they will be prepared to say and do. And what they will be prepared to risk for their fellow human beings. Now, it probably seems really obvious that Bishop Mariann’s theology is progressive and is deeply rooted in social justice. I’ll link to her website in the show notes.
What I thought would be interesting for the purposes of this podcast is to look at where some of these ideas of social justice in modern Christianity might come from. And so today I’m going to focus a bit on Liberation Theology.
MUSICAL BREAK
Liberation theology takes the view that salvation isn’t just about individual spiritual redemption. It also involves liberation from earthly suffering and perhaps most importantly in this worldview from systemic injustice. And there are some key principles of liberation theology.
Firstly is the concept of “preferential option for the poor.” This is the idea that God sides particularly with the impoverished and the oppressed and that Christians have a special duty to help them. It’s important that we think about this very differently to the kinds of Christian charity that you might turn to in your mind when you think about helping the poor. This is very different.
Then, there is the view that salvation isn’t about individual spiritual redemption, as I’ve mentioned, but also involves liberation from the systems which cause injustice. Liberation theologians often interpret biblical stories – for example Exodus – through this lens, seeing them as examples of God’s desire to free people from oppression.
And then there’s the critique of traditional church hierarchies and their historical alignment with wealth, with power and with the interests of wealth and power. Liberation theologians argued that the church should actively work for social justice rather than to maintain the status quo or implement additional systems which just put a sticking plaster on the problems. And we can see these core tenets echoed in mainstream modern Christianity.
Now, it’s probably more accurate to talk about liberation theologies rather than liberation theology singular because the liberatory aspects of theology have been and can be applied in different cultural contexts and by different groups. So black and feminist and queer theologies have all been influenced by aspects of liberation theology.
But the emergence of liberation theology as a movement is associated with Latin America during the 1960s and 70s. It was a radical movement within the Catholic Church. Although it is important to point out that theologies of Black liberation were also emerging at the same time in the American Civil Rights Movement and in apartheid South Africa.
But you’ll find that most theologians, when they talk about Liberation Theology with a big L, are referencing Latin American Liberation Theology. And there are several major figures in the Latin American movement. And I will link to some resources if you’re interested in reading more about them. However, one person that it’s important to mention was the person you’ll often see referenced as the “father” of Liberation Theology and that was Gustavo Gutierrez. Now Gutierrez was a Peruvian priest who wrote the ground-breaking book “A Theology of Liberation” which was published in 1971. In this book, he argued that human salvation wasn’t just an individual thing, that it was also structural and political and that structural social change that favoured the poor and the oppressed was a necessity.
And if you think this sounds a little bit like socialism, you’d be correct. The movement and Gutierrez in particular was influenced by Marxist social analysis. And although not all liberation theologians embraced Marxism, it was definitely influenced by that thought. So he wrote this, that
“A socialist system is more in accord with the Christian principles of true brotherhood, justice and peace. Only socialism can enable Latin America to achieve true development.”
The movement grew up in a very particular place in a very particular time, so there’s a lot about this Latin American liberation theology, which is particular to Latin America. Those of you who are of a progressive frame of mind might think, well, isn’t this just Christianity? And my answer would be, oh, yes, but also no. Liberation theology is not without its critics. And that’s mostly because of its emphasis on political and radical change. Some Christians and some Christian denominations would consider that personal salvation is much more important than the emphasis on social transformation. But also there is a prevailing idea even in modern so-called progressive denominations that Christians shouldn’t really get involved in politics.
Now, if you’ve listened to my episode on politics, you’ll know that I think that’s bollocks. Everything is political. Jesus was political. Jesus got himself crucified because of politics.
So although aspects of liberation theology have have been kind of absorbed into mainstream Christianity and certainly into mainstream Catholicism. Pope Francis is warm towards some ideas of liberation theology. At the time, in the 70s when this was emerging, there wasn’t such a warm welcome in the Vatican. The Pope at the time – John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict. They heavily criticise aspects of liberation theology and in particular, and perhaps not surprisingly, its use of Marxist concepts and its emphasis on political activism.
And as I’ve mentioned, the influence of liberation theology extends beyond Latin America and the specific circumstances of that time and those places. It has inspired other theological movements which have focused on liberation from all forms of oppression.
MUSICAL BREAK
So to circle back to my opening thoughts and remarks about LGBTQ+ people and particularly trans and non-binary people in the USA right now and to Bishop Budde’s remarks directly to the President about those people who are frightened. Liberation theology has had quite a significant influence along with queer theory on queer theology and one person who was deeply influential both in liberation theology and in queer and feminist theology was the theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid. Now she was born in Buenos Aires in Argentina and grew up out of the liberation theology movement and she actually later became a professor in divinity at the University of Edinburgh which is a nice Scottish link for me.
Now one of the critiques that she gave of liberation theology was its lack of emphasis on gender and sexuality. And she thought that it was still coming from a very heterosexist place. Her work is challenging. I don’t mean that it’s difficult. I mean challenging in the best sense of the word. It challenges norms across the board. Her books include “Indecent Theology” and “The Queer God” and of course she is deeply influential on the modern generation of queer theologians. I’m going to link to some resources in the show notes.
Having said all that, you do not need to be deeply immersed in queer theology to accept the principle that a theology of liberation is inclusive of all people who are oppressed and who suffer under systems of discrimination, oppression, marginalisation, hatred, and violence. So if you didn’t hear – in Bishop Budde’s address a call to action, here’s another one…
This is from the Gospel of Matthew chapter 25 beginning to read at verse 34.
“Then the King will say to those at his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared before you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you gave me clothing. I was sick and you took care of me. I was in prison and you visited me.”
And the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?” And the King will answer them.
“Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.””
CLOSING MUSIC
Thank you for listening to UNFKD, the bonus series for the podcast Fucked Up by Faith. I’m Judy Mills. You can listen to the podcast on Spotify or in all the usual podcasty places. Wherever you listen, I’d really appreciate a like, a follow, a review. Let people know. That would be brilliant. You can follow the podcast on Instagram @fkdupbyfaith spelled FKD or you can find me via my website judemills.com. I’d love to hear from you. Go well.
References
Althaus-Reid, Marcella, Indecent Theology : Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics (London: Routledge, 2010)
———, The Queer God (Routledge, 2004)
Bishop Mariann, ‘A Service of Prayer for the Nation Homily’, Episcopal Diocese of Washington, 2025 <https://edow.org/2025/01/22/a-service-of-prayer-for-the-nation-homily/> [accessed 2 February 2025]
Edgar Budde, Mariann, ‘Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, 2025 <https://www.mariannbudde.com/> [accessed 2 February 2025]
Gospel Reading – MATTHEW 25: 34 – 40 (NRSV)
Gutiérrez, Gustavo, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1988)
Liberation Theology, ‘Liberation Theologies | Online Library and Reference Center’, Liberationtheology.org, 2020 <https://liberationtheology.org/> [accessed 2 February 2025]
Queer Theology, ‘QueerTheology.com | Resources for LGBTQ+ Christians and Supporters – Queer Theology’, Queer Theology, 2025 <https://www.queertheology.com> [accessed 2 February 2025]
A while ago, I joked online about feeling a failure because I don’t ( and won’t) go cold water swimming, and I don’t have a Podcast. I rather consigned these – along with the trends of ‘radical self-care and the ‘digital detox’ – to the ‘things I don’t do – let’s leave that to the influencers’ corner. Meanwhile, I focused on being consistent in at least one thing – my utter lack of self- promotion.
I should note, this is despite having a book published in April. I can rather rise to the challenge of creating the odd Instagram story ( still not entirely sure why or what they are for) as long as the creative process of doing so interests me enough to bother. If I can divorce me enough from the process, then I might not die from the exposure.
Which is why a moment’s inspiration last week took me very much by surprise. I woke up one morning knowing that I was going to record a podcast, knowing what it was going to be about, and knowing what it was going to be called.
I swear, it just appeared, fully formed, in my awareness. And God, how I wish that the creative process was always like that! There’s more to it though. My podcast is called FKD UP BY FAITH. In it, I have conversations with people about how they’ve been fucked up by their faith, and (more importantly) how they have found hope, healing, reconciliation and forgiveness.
Within a week of having the idea, I had recorded and published the first episode – with my dear friend Roger Wolsey. At the end of our conversation, he said ‘ you might not see it this way, but this is ministry’. And he put his finger on something that I had sort of realised, but not quite. That this isn’t just about fulfilling my creative urge, it’s about fulfilling my ministry.
It is my ministry.
That thing arriving fully formed, fully created. A gift from the one who inspires us all, if we are inclined to listen. Like all my God-given gifts, I have a feeling that some people are not going to like it. Whilst the spelling FKD is an important adjustment for algorithms and delicate sensibilities, using the F word in the same sentence as the other F word (faith) might bother some folks.
In many ways though, this is probably a good indicator that this is exactly what I should be doing. If I didn’t swear, I wouldn’t be me. I would be denying myself, and my background. This is the thing about inclusivity. Do we accept people as they are… or do we want them to shave the edges off their class and their culture, as well as all the other identities that religion has told (and continues to tell) people they can’t be?
And do you know what else? Jesus hung around with sailors! Have you ever hung around with sailors? I think we can pretty much guarantee that Jesus heard more than the odd F-bomb ( or first-century Palestinian version thereof) and he never mentioned it.
